In Business Monitor Online today, we carry two special features on Standard and Poor’s (S&P)’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating to AA+ on August 5. In the first article, we answer the following questions: Why has the US credit rating been downgraded? What does it mean to be rated AA+ rather than AAA?… [Read more]

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan has described Friday’s devastating earthquake and its aftermath as the country’s worst disaster since World War II. Indeed, it is quite possible that the latest quake will surpass the Great Hanshin Earthquake of January 1995 in terms of lives lost and damages incurred. Japan is better placed than many other… [Read more]

As the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) experiences its biggest shake-up in at least a generation, Business Monitor International (BMI) has just published a special report, MENA Crisis: The Key Risk To Global Recovery And Stability. The report analyses the following topics: The long-term consequences of upheaval for the Middle East and North Africa… [Read more]

After several postponements over the course of 2010, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad finally announced on December 19 that his subsidy reform programme (which is, in effect, a subsidy phase-out programme) would begin immediately. Subsidies cost the government billions of US dollars every year, and Iran’s fiscal situation is so dire at the moment that Ahmadinejad… [Read more]

One of the biggest unknowns in global politics at present is the matter of whether the US and/or Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent the country from developing the atomic bomb. Every now and again, reports crop up in the international media that the US is reinforcing its aircraft carrier presence in the… [Read more]

Corruption is a major problem for most emerging markets, and in truth, quite a few developed states. Time and time again in BMI’s analysis on emerging markets, my colleagues and I have written on how governments need to crack down on corruption, if they want to attract greater foreign investment and prosper. However, this is… [Read more]

The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism in Europe was probably inevitable, given the inability of the Communist system to compete economically with the West. We now hear that communism was ‘unsustainable’ and I largely agree, but at the same time I don’t think it was inevitable that the Berlin Wall… [Read more]